Posted by Jason Robert on December 4, 2008 at 9:18am
I want to make a Gimbal mount for my boat that will stay leveled wherever I put it. The Boat pitches and rolls but I dont want the camera to. Does anyone have some designs or know how to connect a gyro to servos to make this happen? I could really use your help. Thanks for all your input.Jason
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Jokingly ... search for the chicken video on this site and mount your camera to the head of a live chicken.
With an IMU that measures pitch/roll accurately (should be easier to get good accuracy on a boat versus a plane in flight) you could use that to drive servos opposite of the pitch and roll ... with a little work to callibrate what servo position corresponds to what angle offset.
For about $6k you could buy a really nice IMU (Microbotics MIDG) that dumps your angles and position out the serial port ... you could plug that into a PC or some embedded computer, connect your servos up to some sort of serial servo driver board (I've seen several available for < $50), then you'd just need a bit of software in between to parse the MIDG output, compute a servo command, and send it out to the servo driver board. It would all be pretty straightforward.
Or maybe you could try a thermopile based sensor instead of an expensive IMU and mount the sensor/camera at the highest point of your boat where it is clear of obstacles ...
Replies
With an IMU that measures pitch/roll accurately (should be easier to get good accuracy on a boat versus a plane in flight) you could use that to drive servos opposite of the pitch and roll ... with a little work to callibrate what servo position corresponds to what angle offset.
For about $6k you could buy a really nice IMU (Microbotics MIDG) that dumps your angles and position out the serial port ... you could plug that into a PC or some embedded computer, connect your servos up to some sort of serial servo driver board (I've seen several available for < $50), then you'd just need a bit of software in between to parse the MIDG output, compute a servo command, and send it out to the servo driver board. It would all be pretty straightforward.
Or maybe you could try a thermopile based sensor instead of an expensive IMU and mount the sensor/camera at the highest point of your boat where it is clear of obstacles ...
Curt.